Digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies have become a widely-used solution for providing high bit rate transmission over the existing copper wire infrastructure, known as the “subscriber loop.” DSL technologies dramatically improve the bandwidth of the existing analog telephone system. DSL enhances the data capacity of the existing copper wire that runs between the local telephone company switching offices and most homes and offices. The bandwidth of the wire is limited to approximately 3,000 Hz due to its primary use as a voice telephone system. While the wire itself can handle higher frequencies, the telephone switching equipment is designed to cut-off signals above 4,000 Hz to filter noise off the voice line. DSL enables high-speed data traffic from a service provider network, such as an ATM network, to be provided on the existing wires with voice traffic.
In order to provide DSL service, a digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM) is employed at the local telephone company central office or digital loop carrier (DLC) to separate the voice-frequency traffic provided by the public-switched telephone network (PSTN) from the high-speed data traffic service provided by the network service provider. A DSLAM concentrates the high-speed data traffic and routes it to subscribers on twisted-pair wires, referred to as a local loop. Many DSLAMs are designed to work with ATM networks.
Generally, a DSLAM includes an uplink interface, a switch concentration module (SCM), a backplane interface, and multiple line cards. High-speed data traffic from an ATM network is received by the uplink interface via multiple data communications channels. The high-speed data traffic is then transmitted to the SCM where it is transmitted to the backplane interface. The backplane interface provides the high-speed data traffic to multiple DSL ports in the line cards for subsequent delivery to subscribers.
As will be described in more detail below, in order to establish an ATM connection through the DSLAM, each node must be provisioned with matching ATM virtual channel information or virtual path identifier (VPI)/virtual circuit identifier (VCI) addresses. With existing DSLAMs, for each connection through the DSLAM, a VPI/VCI address must be configured on each node to match the VPI/VCI addresses corresponding to the data communications channels received from the external ATM network. This manual configuration of multiple VPI/VCI addresses within the DSLAM is very time consuming and costly.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address these aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies by automatically configuring ATM cross-connects in a DSLAM between a plurality of digital subscriber line channels and a plurality of data communications channels provided from an ATM service provider.